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Four Voices in Robert Silverberg's Dying Inside

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SOURCE: “Four Voices in Robert Silverberg's Dying Inside,” in Critical Encounters II: Writers and Themes in Science Fiction, edited by Tom Staicar, Frederick Ungar, 1982, pp. 90-103.

[In the following essay, Alterman analyzes the philosophical implications of and narrative strategies informing the multiple points of view used in Dying Inside.]

The power of language is astonishing. By judiciously selecting the right mix of words and stringing them together just so, a writer can create the whole universe within the mind of a reader. If, among the improbabilities the writer chooses, there are huge orbital space stations spinning against the blackness of interstellar space, or giant amoebae casually snacking on leg of starlet, well, then, we recognize the improbable reality created as science fiction. On the other hand, when the improbabilities are few—the landscape well known, the situations and characters drawn from everyday life—then they constitute mere fiction.

Like every other generalization about language, literature, and psychology, what I have just said won't really stand up to harsh analysis. Generally, however, it is fair to say that science fiction is more improbable than the novel of romantic intrigue. On the face of it, distinguishing science fiction from so-called realistic fiction would appear to be a fairly simple thing. After all, science fiction is demonstrably more improbable than fiction about current society, isn't it?

This question artfully leads to Robert Silverberg's novel Dying Inside, a science fiction novel whose protagonist is a genre cliché, a telepath. It is also a novel about the change in a man's life caused by aging, set in the real New York City of the early seventies. We could call this a novel about a man's “midlife crisis.” No worlds are shattered, no galactic civilizations are saved from conquest, not even one diabolical Russian spy plot is discovered.

What does happen is that David Selig, the telepathic protagonist, loses his telepathic power (hence the title), is mugged by black students on the steps of Columbia University's Low Library, and comes to a tentative rapprochement with his sister. During the course of the novel, we learn about David's past, his worries, thoughts, and private ecstasies; we discover the interior life of a telepath. Through flashbacks we learn the effects of telepathy on David's childhood, his emotional relationships, the two women he had lived with, the only other telepath he has ever known, and above all, his sister. It doesn't sound much like science fiction, does it?

But Dying Inside is generally considered science fiction, and very good science fiction at that. Also, it's not as though the novel of character hasn't been successfully written as science fiction. Frederik Pohl did it in Gateway; Delany's Triton did it in a completely different way. Olaf Stapledon's Sirius and Odd John come to mind also.

The real distinction between Dying Inside and the formula telepath stories is scope. The scope of Dying Inside is the private, psychological life of one inconspicuous man doing nothing more sinister than ghostwriting student papers for hire, but who is losing the single most basic part of his identity, his gift for reading minds. This focus has been called, disparagingly, the curse of Henry James. Dying Inside is an example of how unfair that generalization can be. A novel which can create a realistic picture of the psychological life of a telepath can reveal things about telepathy which all the suspense and adventure fiction in the genre cannot. For one, it can tell us what it's like to read minds, and how it feels to do it.

Dying Inside is also about dying and being reborn. In 1971 and 1972, when this novel was written, Silverberg also published a number of other works concerned with death and rebirth. Among them are Downward to the Earth, a novel about a former colonial administrator's search for rebirth on the alien world he once managed; Son of Man, a strange novel in which the human protagonist meets a series of characters who are future human forms; The Second Trip, about a man who returns to society after the equivalent of a personality transplant; and the novella “Born with the Dead,” in which the protagonist follows his beloved wife through death and revivification. Clearly, the themes of death and rebirth were churning around inside Silverberg's head during the time Dying Inside was written.

Dying Inside is a tapestry woven from flashbacks, contemporary narrative, excerpts from essays, and confessions. The flashbacks show what telepathy meant to David's earlier life and identity. The essays he writes show his grasp of expository prose, his intellectual competence (the papers are too good to be student-written), and are used incidentally to comment on his personal situation. In the contemporary narrative, David Selig's story is of a ghostwriter who is beaten by a dissatisfied customer. Along the way he memorializes the death of his power to read minds, has dinner with his sister, attends a faculty party, and has dinner with his sister a second time.

When we are introduced to David in chapter one, we immediately learn about his literary ability and how he makes his living. In this chapter alone he quotes Eliot twice, Beckett once, and cites Yeats. During the course of the novel, his grasp of Western humanities becomes evident. He is at home with Kafka's novels, ancient Greek poetry and drama, Montaigne, Virgil, and Dante. He quotes Huxley, Wiener, and the Curé d'Ars. He's somewhat pompous—imagine, “Poor goofy Yeats”! David is obsessed by his age. Writing about Kafka's novels, he says:

The two books represent varying attempts at telling the same story, that of the existentially disengaged man who is suddenly involved in a situation from which there is no escape, and who, after making attempts to achieve the grace that will release him from his predicament, succumbs.

This is an excellent summary of David's own condition and of the course of the novel.

The goal Kafka's Joseph K reaches for is the goal David strives for: grace in acceptance of the inevitable. His power is dying, the power which has both blighted and illuminated his life:

It's always been a curse to him, hasn't it? It's cut him off from his fellow men and doomed him to a loveless life. … On the other hand, without the power, what are you? Without that one faltering unpredictable unsatisfactory means of contact with them, how will you be able to touch them at all? … You love it and you despise it, this gift of yours. You dread losing it despite all it's done to you. You'll fight to cling to the last shreds of it, even though you know the struggle's hopeless.

The last line here emphasizes David's identification with Joseph K.

David's soul is cleft; he loathes his ability and at the same time he clings to it. On the novel's first page, he splits himself in two. He speaks of “myself and … that creature which lives within me, skulking in its spongy lair and spying on unsuspecting mortals.” David rejects his power; he distances himself from it psychically. It is the fault of his telepathy that David is isolated, unloved, a failure.

His power has condemned him to being “society's ugliest toad, the eavesdropper, the voyeur.” He is Leopold Bloom of Ulysses watching his wife tupped by Blazes Boylan, through a keyhole. The connection between telepathic power and sexual potency is emphasized throughout Dying Inside. David's sister frequently refers to the connection, and David makes much of it himself. When David finally admits his secret to his sister Judith, it is in the context of his knowing about her sex life. The words she uses in responding to his revelation are touchstones of the telepathy-sexuality connection: “… why I always felt dirty when I was a kid and you were around. … If I ever catch you poking around in my head after this, I'll cut your balls off.”

That David equates his telepathic power with sexual power is not pathological, though. Athletes equate their sexual potency with their special prowess, as do many writers. This is a nice bit of psychological realism: telepathy feels like any other ability; it's part of one's identity, and therefore part of one's sexual identity. This particular conjunction, however, is poisoned. Since David cannot send his thoughts, but only receive, he sees himself as passive, a voyeur. The problem with the power is transferred, psychologically, to the personality.

As a voyeur, David feels isolated. The only other telepath he meets, Tom Nyquist, is aghast at this attitude:

“The problem is that I feel isolated from other human beings.”


“Isolated? You? … How can you pretend you're isolated?”


“The information I get is useless,” Selig said. “I can't act on it. I might just as well not be reading it in.”

This is the heart of the irony. David can watch, but not act. His telepathic power gives him access to a keyhole; it is not a key.

David feels isolated by his telepathic power because it is essentially passive. Nonetheless, it is a form of communication. Without it, David is alone; his one method of communicating with the world is gone. This argument seems to be quite reasonable, except that telepathy has kept him isolated. Release from telepathy—to be merely normal—should imply revivification. After all, he no longer will be part of the.001٪ of humanity with the power to read minds. He won't be a voyeur anymore.

But no. David dreads the death of his power as a descent into absolute isolation. Without his telepathy, who is he? “Where's my identity? I'm Selig the Mindreader, right? The Amazing Mental Man. So if I stop being him—” One of the things David is, without his power, is normal, mortal. Look back to the above quotation from page one of the novel and note the word “mortals.” There's a key to his desire to keep his power: it makes him godlike. He thinks of himself as more than mortal, and when his power dies, it leaves “behind this merely mortal husk of mine.”

The connection between godhood and telepathy is another true note this novel chimes, like the association between potency and telepathy. David thinks of himself as a Christ. He parodies Jesus' words, as in “let nothing human be alien to me” and he fears crucifixion if his ability is ever discovered: “They'd all love me. Loving me, they'd beat me to a pulp.”

The twin themes of communion and godhood join together in the ecstasy which the telepathy provides him, and transcendence is the watchword.

Yes! Oh, the joining, the touching, the union, the oneness! No longer is he David Selig. He is a part of them, and they are a part of him, and in that joyous blending he experiences loss of self, he gives up all that is tired and worn and sour in him, he gives up his fears and uncertainties, he gives up everything that has separated himself from himself for so many years. He breaks through. He is fully open and the immense signal of the universe rushes freely into him. He receives. He transmits. He absorbs. He radiates. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

In his transcendent state he is not David Selig. He is all. The union is sexual, godlike, total. It surpasses the receive-only condition of his power. Actually, it is mystical. The acquiescence of the four “yesses” at the end of the quote above is practically orgasmic. It is also the state of grace he aspires to as his power dies.

This condition of ecstasy is the one true gift David has gleaned from his telepathic power—an orgasm of selflessness, the joy of losing one's ego in something larger than oneself. In these ecstatic moments of total contact, David mines “the real stuff, the whole person.” At bottom, David's transcendental ecstasy is a way of getting outside himself, of being part of someone or something else. Without it, he is caught inside himself, which one would think would be a fate David would desire. After all, in the privacy of his own mind he can be himself. And yet, that circumstance is just one which frightens him, because it is one he has never experienced. The privacy and silence terrify him. They trap him inside his single self and he is permanently cut off from the ecstasy he has known.

David equates the coming silence with death. In an interior essay written in the term paper style, David links communication and entropy to death:

Human beings, says Wiener, carry on anti-entropic processes. We have sensory receptors. We communicate with one another. We make use of what we learn from one another. … But what if a human being turns himself, inadvertantly or by choice, into an isolated system? … Gradually the chaos expands in him, gradually the forces of entropy seize possession of this ganglion, that synapse. He takes in a decreasing amount of sensory data until his surrender to entropy is complete. … This condition is known as death.

So not only is David's loss of telepathy a reverse apotheosis, a loss of potency, a loss of identity and isolation from the living, it is death. Personal death as well as the “heat-death of the universe.”

In fact, looking at the language of these citations, it would appear that David equates his condition (aging) with the process of universal entropic decay. At the beginning of the novel, David compares himself to Prufrock, Malone and Bloom. Here he compares himself to the universe.

And why not? The transcendental ecstasy of David's telepathic communions does make him part of a larger whole. It is, however, true that the whole is indifferent to the fate of one of its motes. This is why the correspondence between David and the universe is weak, and an example of the exaggerations of self-pity which he is heir to throughout the novel.

Structurally, the novel presents us with a correspondence between the decay of David's telepathic power and the decay of Western civilization. Not only does David's ability to read minds knit him into society more intensely than normal, but he is a fount of Western humanism. He lives by it for the purposes of his papers, and because of his mastery of the subjects coupled with his telepathic ability to read his clients' minds, he can always deliver and guarantee his work.

Except for Yahya Lumumba. David has difficulty with Lumumba's paper because he cannot find an appropriate voice to use. He dips into Lumumba's mind and finds it “A roaring furnace … I can't handle this volcanic blast.” Not only is David driven off by the intensity of the mind, his power actually shuts down: “Never have I lost my grip and slipped from a mind like this. I look up, dazed, shattered.” This last quote highlights the connection between Lumumba's hatred and David's coming psychic impotence, as Lumumba beats David unconscious, following which David loses his power for good.

Besides the obvious hatred Lumumba has, the second and more significant reason that David cannot produce the paper is that Lumumba has no ties to Western culture:

Europydes Sophocles Eeskilus why the fuck do I have to know anything about them to write anything about them what good is it to a black man those old dead Greek fuckers how are they relevant to the black experience relevant relevant relevant

Not only is Lumumba unable to write the essay, he cannot find a reference point in his experience for it.

In effect, David fails to satisfy Lumumba with a paper because Lumumba's young life, both in and out of the university, is an artifact of society's sports culture. David, of course, is unconcerned with trivialities such as college basketball. Yet to Lumumba, basketball is truly the only important issue in his life. It got him into college, presumably. Writing papers on Greek plays did not. The black youth (the future) is divorced from the cultural tradition of Western civilization (Europydes Sophocles Eeskilus). Furthermore, Lumumba hates the purveyors of such knowledge (David, the assignment, Jews). David's other jock clients at least find their cultural inheritance relevant, if not accessible. Symbolically, hatred, violence, and physical activity, supersede the more genteel and intellectual characteristics of the old society.

It is pretty clear that David is losing a lot, but as we have come to expect in this novel, there is a more mundane side to the issue. David bemoans not only the loss of his power, but his loss of hair, the death of his contemporaries, and the rise to power of those younger than he. The death of his power is just a warmup for the real thing. Since he cannot reverse time, entropy, or the loss of his telepathic power, David must accept inevitability; he tries to be a good Joseph K. This he does by groping his way unsteadily towards a bond with his sister Judith.

At the outset of the novel, Judith is attempting to reconcile herself with David after years of hostility. David is not a willing partner to the reconciliation at first: “Her love is unpalatable to me, and her sentimentalism is even less to my taste. … Her remorse for her past coldness toward me has a flavor even more stinking than her newfound love.” He feels this way partly because he still mistrusts her for “all the years when she treated me like a circus attraction” and consequently his perception of their relationship is dark:

We're locked in a kind of marriage, Judith and I, an old burned-out marriage held together with skewers.

As David loses his ability to read minds, he finds himself drawn increasingly to her. She is the only person he can discuss his condition with, for one thing. For another, she is his only living relative, his only source of love, no matter how bitter. She confides her sexual and romantic concerns to him, in return for his love.

When David recounts the story of his revealing his power to her, he discovers the kernel of closeness hidden within him: she never used the knowledge of his telepathy against him. It is as if recognizing this allows David to draw closer to her, and as an example, he attends a party given by one of her lovers at her request. At the end of the novel, when he is merely human, David accepts and returns her love: “I embrace her warmly, pulling her tight against my body for perhaps a minute.”

David is learning that he can communicate; that his loss can actually be seen as a gain, and that love can become a distinct possibility in his life. His growing love for Judith is the touchstone of the change, of course, but he projects that potential onto a fantasized meeting with ex-lover Toni, and into an imaginary letter to his lost love, Kitty:

As the power slips away from me, as it dies, perhaps there's a chance for an ordinary human relationship between us at last, of the kind that ordinary human beings have all the time.

David sees the potential for a normal life in the vacuum left behind by his vanishing telepathic power, and he acts on it. Dying Inside ends with the family, or marriage, as David points out, reunited, held together by mutual caring rather than by skewers. The feel of it is reminiscent of the happy endings of Shakespeare's comedies, where marriages not only restore order to the specific relationships, but to the State and to Nature as well.

David is a mortal at the end of the novel, one who can give and receive love. He still is not secure in his identity, still shocked and filled with loss. But he has touched grace, and he feels that acceptance is within reach. The novel ends with David saying “hello” four times, echoing the accepting “yes” of his last telepathic moments.

David's acceptance and achievement of grace are important to the novel because they come only after he acknowledges that he does want to keep his ability, which is an important developmental step. The method he attempts to use to reclaim his dying power (a feat he acknowledges to be impossible) appears in the fifth chapter, which is an essaylike discussion of Huxley's theory of a “cerebral reducing valve” which filters out paranormal insights, thus allowing daily life to be lived. From this conceit, David proceeds to speculate on the physiology of self-abuse as a means of opening the reducing valve. Since he wants to revivify his power, flagellation seems like a possible tactic. So for the rest of the novel David flays himself with emotionally painful recollections.

It doesn't work, of course, as he knew it wouldn't. Yet by knowing that he is doomed (a fact he repeats often), he gains one distinct advantage. It assures him that he will be a tragic figure like Joseph K and reach a form of grace, rather than K., “who simply sinks lower and lower … so crushed by the general tragedy of the times that he is incapable of any tragedy on an individual level. K. is a pathetic figure, Joseph K a tragic one.” Knowing he is doomed and that he can only accept assures David that he is not K., who could not even reach that perception.

Within the mundane world of David's 1976 New York, the grandeur of this goal transforms itself into skipping a Chinese dinner. David isn't only mocking himself in that, though. He's also truly ambivalent and unable to believe in the restoration of his power. Beside that, the rest of chapter six, from which the Chinese dinner transformation is taken, is pretty unusual.

For one thing, it's only a single short paragraph long. For another, the paragraph begins in the third person: “But why does David Selig want his power to come back?”, slides into the second person: “On the other hand, without the power, what are you?”, and finishes in the first person: “I'll skip the chow mein.” It's as much as he can do in his world, skipping a meal; at least it is an acknowledgment of his desire to keep the power.

Now, recognizing the strangeness of chapter six, think about the “essays” in chapters four, fourteen, and twenty-three, and the fact that chapters two, twelve, sixteen, twenty, twenty-two and twenty-five are written in the third person.

Most of these latter are flashbacks, separated in time from David's present. Moreover, they are all focused on the experience of being telepathic. Chapter two is an interview David has with a school psychologist which clarifies how then-current behavioral sciences failed to deal with either David's telepathy or anxiety. Chapter twelve exemplifies the experience of David's telepathic ecstasies. In chapter sixteen, David meets Tom Nyquist, another telepath, and we understand how two telepaths communicate. Chapter twenty is another childhood flashback, to a time when David's power was almost discovered in school. Chapter twenty-two documents David's meeting Kitty Holstein and his inability to read her mind. In chapter twenty-five, David finally loses his telepathic power and his former way of life.

To see how important the question of voice is to the novel, look back at the very first paragraph of the first chapter of the novel. Near the end of the paragraph, the following appears:

Let us go then, you and I, when the morning is spread out against the sky. …


You and I. To whom do I refer? I'm heading downtown alone, after all. You and I.


Why, of course I refer to myself and to that creature which lives within me, skulking in its spongy lair …

The “you and I” are introduced as part of the reference to Eliot's “Prufrock,” but quickly David picks up the words and focuses on them.

You and I. David is a man split in two. He sees himself as separated into David Selig and the power of telepathy. This division strengthens our sense of how divided he is on the question of his telepathy. It also is an intimate device for speaking directly to the reader. For example, looking back on chapter six, the “you” clearly refers to himself. Yet at the end of chapter nineteen the “you” referred to is clearly the reader:

What the hell are you doing reading someone else's mail? Don't you have any decency? I can't show you this.

In this section, we are put into the role of voyeur which David accuses himself of, and then treated accordingly. The whole chapter has this sense of direct communication between David and the reading audience. The tour of his life furnishings isn't for his own benefit so much as it is for ours.

Although there is one point of view in Dying Inside, there are four voices: “I,” “you,” “he,” and none. Each, in its own way, contributes to enlarging the reality of David's telepathy. The sections of the novel written from the “I” are immediate in time and impact. We have immediate access to David's thoughts and feelings in these sections, as well as his actions. We are embedded in David's mind just as he can imbed himself in other minds. The process works as a mirror.

In the sections written in the “you” voice, David is either talking to his split self, a technique which dramatizes the duality he believes in, or directly to the reader. Either way, the communication is less intimate than the unobtrusive intimacy of the implied listener of the “I” sections. When David is talking to “you,” he is more self-conscious. An example of this is his retreat from exposure in the quote from chapter nineteen, above. When his “I” writes an imaginary letter to Kitty, the pain David feels is obvious. He abruptly becomes aware of his audience, though, and shuts the letter off. He increases the distance; he guards his privacy.

The chapters written in the “he” voice are more distant yet. They are flashbacks in his personal history, and as such they are about David Seligs who are no longer the David Selig who is losing his telepathic power. They are in the past, which is distance. They are also about the experience of being telepathic. In this novel, it is imperative that we experience what it feels like to be telepathic. The focus on the telepathic experience nicely couples with the distance that using “he” creates, for it shows David isolating himself from the telepathic David (the “you” of page one). And, since this is David's special experience, use of the “he” distances the reader further in a way which adds stylistic impact to David's claim that his power isolates him from the rest of humanity.

And then there are two apparently nontelepathic chapters, twenty-two and twenty-five, written in the third person. In chapter twenty-two, David meets Kitty and finds that he cannot read her mind. Here the distance from self which the “he” provides is a good match for the isolation David feels from the woman he loves. In chapter twenty-five, David wakes in a hospital after having been beaten unconscious. Then, before the Dean of Columbia, he experiences a transcendental moment of ecstasy, and his power dies.

First, the distance of the “he” construction is a stylistic match for the alienation of the hospital, where he is first ignored, then treated impersonally. The fact that, in the former chapter, he cannot read Kitty's mind is an obvious parallel construction. Second, the transcendent ecstasy belongs to the list of telepathic experiences described in the third person in earlier chapters. Third, David's loss, finally, of his power is a profoundly isolating experience, and being far from his perspective reinforces that fact. The style matches the content and reinforces it.

The three “essays” which dot the novel are papers that David writes, two for students, one to himself. In each, the subject ostensibly is an intellectual analysis of a nonpersonal issue: Kafka's novels, the Oresteian myth cycle, and information theory, entropy, and death. And yet, each comments directly on David's condition. Joseph K's problem is David's problem. The truncated discussion of the “Electra theme” is about interpreting an act from several different perspectives. This we do with the different “voices.” It is also the beginning of a discussion about the interaction of the individual and destiny, another of David's concerns.

Finally, David's essay on communication, entropy, and death ties the essay from explicitly into an analysis of his condition. In a paper on “Entropy as a Factor in Everyday Life,” for “Selig Studies” run by “Prof. Selig,” he discusses his perception of the relationship between lack of communication and death, a highly emotional topic for him.

These dispassionate essays offer relevant parallels to the larger concerns of David's stories. They are overviews, though, theories, like Huxley's “cerebral reducing valve,” which define the larger structure—the philosophical underpinnings—of David's loss. They help answer the question of why we should care about David and his problems. He is not just a freak; he is a man who is living through an experience, which, in many ways, is fundamental to us all. The stylistic sleight-of-hand is designed to offer us a share of that experience.

The four different voices of Dying Inside allow Silverberg to alter the focal distance between us and David. From deep within his mind, we can pull back to look at the larger picture, the philosophical implications and the story of David's loss of his telepathic power. The skill with which the style enhances the themes help knit them smoothly into a very believable story about a very believable man. The “Amazing Mental Man” comes alive in Dying Inside.

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